ProtonMail – The secure NSA-Proof Switzerland based email provider

After the NSA surveillance scandal broke out, many people were concerned about their privacy, worrying that the National Security Agency or anyone else might be checking on their emails. Some students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard got together and developed a new super-secure alternative to other email services, the ProtonMail.

“It was the Snowden leaks that got us started. A lot of us at the time were working at CERN, the nuclear research facility in Switzerland, and we started hearing about all this and we really freaked out. We ended up posting on Facebook about privacy issues, and it just grew from there.”

ProtonMail was founded in 2013 by a team of scientists who met at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland with a goal to offer “a more secure and private internet” to protect people from surveillance carried out by governments and big corporations. The email service provider’s public beta launched in May 2014 allowing anyone to open a ProtonMail Beta account instantly without waiting for invitation.

They have adopted an end-to-end encryption and the data gets encrypted in the browser itself before it goes to the server. So the ProtonMail has no access to these messages and cannot decrypt them. The company also hosts all their servers outside the US in Switzerland, where all the user data is protected by strict privacy laws and remains safe.

ProtonMail is easy to use and works in any modern web browser. It is also mobile friendly. It can be easily accessed from PC, laptop, tablet or smartphone. You can also send and receive emails from those who are not using ProtonMail.

Key features of ProtonMail include:

End-to-end Encryption

Swiss Based

Expiration

Compatible

Unsend

ZeroAccess

Scheduling

No Installation

No Ads

Free Forever

ProtonMail launched a fund raising campaign in June this year on IndieGoGo and raised $550,492 against a goal of $100,000 till the campaign closed on 31 July 2014. The company will use these funds to buy and host servers to support new accounts and to improve the service further.